The End Of Free Will

Posted on June 26, 2025 by thezman

753

Note: Last night we had a great show, one of the greatest shows ever, on Iran and Islam, with a special mystery guest who has a lot of first hand experience with both topics. You can listen to the replay here and here.

The late polemicist Christopher Hitchens famous quipped, “Yes, I have free will; I have no choice but to have it.” He was addressing the paradoxical nature of free will in that even if it were an illusion, and we could somehow figure that out, we would be forced to carry on as if it were real. Everything about how we understand ourselves as human beings, and how we get on with one another, depends on the assumption that we have choices and we make those choices freely.

The reason for that is our societies and even our own minds are organized around prescriptive requirements, not descriptive ones. Sure, we know not to step off a roof as the facts tell us we will accelerate toward the sidewalk below, until we reach the sidewalk and suddenly decelerate. It is that rapid deceleration that kills us and that is a fact not subject to opinion. The reason we believe it is immoral to jump off a roof or kill yourself in any other way has nothing to do with physics.

Suicide is a choice. In Western societies at this point in time, making that choice, regardless of the circumstances, is immoral. In other times and other places, suicide was an honorable option. The Japanese used to treat ritual suicide as an honorable end for a man who faced a disgraceful end. The West used to have the idea of leaving a doomed man alone with a bottle of whiskey and revolver. The former was to gain the required courage to use the latter for the honorable act.

As an aside, this is why the liberal project was doomed from the start. It assumed that there was a universally correct way for humans to organize their societies. We could use reason and observations of nature to arrive at the correct way we ought and ought not act and how we should and should not organize our societies. We can reason our way to a set of universal moral principles. Then we can reason our way to building a society around those moral principles.

The liberal project, all of the ideologies that have spring from it, assumes that human beings are programmed to work best in a specific sort of society. We naturally function at our best within a specific set of rules. If we can figure out those rules and then figure out how to impose them, man will be liberated from the oppression of having to live against his nature within a hostile set of rules. This is the goal of libertarianism, anarchism, communism, progressivism and so on.

This brings us back to the issue of free will. Ideologies fail, because they assume that once the rules are imposed, people no longer have to make choices between the things they desire. Free will is no longer be necessary. Even if free will is an illusion, however, it is one necessary for us to be human beings, rather than moist robots. There is something about the nature of man that requires the belief in free will. Without this illusion, if that is what it is, we cease to be human and cease to exist.

It is probably why we lack the language to discuss the descriptive world in purely descriptive terms. You see that in this post by W. M. Briggs. He is taking on a post by former physicist and current YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who tries to argue that free will is a myth and you should stop believing in it. As Briggs notes, her language, even when discussing the laws of physics, is prescriptive. Even when we think descriptively, we end up using prescriptive language.

This crackpot notion that we would be better off if we chose to not believe in free will is not new to Sabine Hossenfelder. Like all such arguments, the first person to think about it was the first man with enough free time to waste some of it on contemplating pointless questions like do we have free will? Idle hands do the Devil’s work and the best proof of that is philosophy. Everywhere there have been idle hands we find the philosopher and Hell follows with him.

Of course, free will is a slippery concept. There is libertarian free will, which argues that for any choice we make, we could have chosen otherwise, even if all of the conditions that could impact our decision were identical. For example, you chose to arrive at work on time, but you could have arrived earlier or later, even assuming some negative or positive consequences to the choices. Like so much of libertarianism, this makes sense if you forget that humans live in societies with other humans.

The other form of free will involves morality. Often, oaths have a line where the person taking the oath testifies that he is taking the oath of his own free will. In criminal proceedings we differentiate between knowingly committing a crime and inadvertently or accidentally committing a crime. The driver who purposely runs down a pedestrian is treated differently from the person who does so while trying to avoid a group of school children because of our notion of free will.

Both conceptualizations of free will are most likely illusions, like much of what we think we understand about the natural world. What we think of as physical reality is probably a simplified illusion of reality. Our brains evolved to conceptualize the parts of reality we need to understand in order for our genes to advance to the next round. The concept of free will is just another item in the toolkit. Even our ability to question our conceptualization of reality is probably an illusion.

That is the problem with Sabine Hossenfelder’s argument. Whether or not free will, however defined, is a real thing does not matter, other than it being a useful topic around which to build a post. Whether you believe it or not does not matter, but once you decide to act as if it is not real, then you enter the world in which it is perfectly acceptable to remove the people who cannot fit your model of society. In the end, every ideologue must reject free will in order to pull the trigger.

That is the end of the free will debate. The age of ideology has taught us that in order to have societies that accommodate human nature, we must choose to organize ourselves as comes naturally to use. That means leaving others to organize themselves as comes naturally to them. Once you start down the path of rejecting free will, you end up on the road that leads to industrial slaughter and the menticide that now promises to extinguish the Western world.

We have free will and if we did not have it, we would have no choice but to invent as it is the only way we can live as human beings. That means we have a choice as to how we organize ourselves. We must collectively choose our metaphysics and our morality and choose how we deal with those who undermine our choices. Those who choose otherwise, in effect, choose not to be us. Therefore, we have the choice to exclude them from us, even choosing to use force if necessary.

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Hebrewism

Posted on June 25, 2025 by thezman

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One of the many strange things to come out of the short war between Israel and Iran is the fact that many of our politicians seem to worship Jewish people. It could also be that they worship Israel or perhaps some combination of both. They talk about Israel and the Jewish people as if they are gods sent to earth as a test. Those who commit themselves to protecting these magical beings are the people of the light, while everyone else is in the forever darkness.

This is not a new thing. It has always been assumed that Washington loves Israel because Israel pays cash for its politicians and there is nothing a politician loves more than cash, except maybe the person handing him the cash. The Israel lobby has been one of the most fearsome advocacy groups in America for a long time. Men like Joe Sobran and Pat Buchanan questioned their influence and were then run out of town for the crime of mentioning the Israel lobby.

The most recent example of this is Ted Cruz, who went on the Tucker Carlson show and bragged that his sole purpose for being in the Senate is to serve Israel. “I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the largest defender of Israel in the United States.” The cavalier way in which he says these things tells us that it is the default position for Washington pols. His subsequent attempts to justify this on religious grounds say there is more to it.

This is where most people shift the focus from old fashion graft to the political marketplace, which in this case means Christian Zionism. This is the heresy that claims the establishment of Israel and the return of the Jewish diaspora to the Holy Land signals the Second Coming. Not content to let events take their course, believers assume they have a duty to help this process along. Their fanatical support for pro-Israel politicians is part of the scheme.

It is a weird cult, for sure, but how many people follow it is unknown. The numbers cannot be large enough to explain the behavior of Washington. Another culprit is Dispensationalism, which is a madhouse collection of crackpot ideas loosely based in the uneducated reading of Scripture. Despite its fringe status, it has had a strong influence on Evangelicals, who do make up a sizable voting bloc. These voters have had a big influence on Republican political theatrics.

Still another cause is dominion theology, which is a low church Protestant version of Catholic integralism that has existed in Europe for centuries. This is the political argument that says America should be governed by Christians and organized around their understanding of Scripture. Since there is a lot of overlap between these people and the Christian Zionist, the result is an assertion that it is the Christian duty of Americans to support Israel.

The trouble with these explanations is that politicians ignore the voters all the time because most are not subject to a genuine political marketplace. Only ten percent of elected officials face competitive races. The rest are in seats held by one party of the other in perpetuity, so they have no reason to fear the voters. Ted Cruz, for example, just has to make the transplants in Dallas and Houston happy and these are not people spending their nights reading Scripture.

While it is risky to oppose the Israel lobby, no politician risks anything by ignoring the Christian Zionist voters or any voting bloc. Republicans worry more about the black vote, which goes 90% Democrat, than their white Christian voters. The reason for that is they worry about being called racist by their pals in Washington. They could, if they chose, take the same approach to the Israel lobby, if official Washington decided they have had enough of the Israel business.

Not even Democrats, who have always made antiwar noises, bothered to speak up in the last round of warmongering. Many joined their Republican colleagues in pledging undying support for Israel. They went well beyond what is typically expected from the Israel lobby to the point where it looked as if most of our elected officials had joined a cult that worships Jewish people. Many of them sounded deranged as they screamed for blood in another pointless war of choice.

That may be the missing piece to this. Washington is deep into the racket stage of imperial decline, which means everyone inside Washington looks at the political system in the same way the locals look at the Walmart in a ghetto riot. There is no higher purpose to the life of the politician, as he is just a vehicle for pillaging what remains of the white middle-class and the old America they represent. Israel worship may fill the void that exist where republican virtue once existed.

It is not a simple, linear explanation for the behavior, which is what most people prefer, but it does tie these other causes together. The calls and emails these politicians get from nutty Christian Zionist are validation for their sincere professions of faith in the great people of Israel. The max donation handshakes they get from men in little hats after each speech on behalf of Israel is proof that they are on the side of angels, rather than paid spokesman for a parasitic economic elite.

No man, not even the most debased and corrupt, views himself as the villain in the great story of his life. For Washington politicians, whose lives are defined by the corruption that is Washington, Hebrewism offers a way to see themselves, even for a little while, as selfless heroes. Ted Cruz got to feel like the white hat for a day after that Tucker Carlson sit-down, even though his voters savaged him. He can live without the love of his voters, as long as he has his little gods in little hats.

Mullahs, Rabbis & Priests

Posted on June 24, 2025 by thezman

One of the things ignored about the outbreak of war between Iran, Israel and the United States is that it brought the great religions into conflict. The prior wars in the region have been mostly Israel against one of the Muslim countries or the United States against one of the Muslim countries. This is the first time that all three religions were in open conflict with one another. The conflict reveals some things about the state of each of the Abrahamic religions and the cultures they represent.

The cause of the war, of course, was the sneak attack by Israel, and supported by the United States, aimed at decapitating the Iranian government. Putting everything about the region aside, it was an insane act. Israel is a tiny country, while Iran is a big country, so any war between the two will be lopsided. The only way this made any sense is if Israel assumed they would get help from the United States, but even then, it was a reckless act that wreaks of desperation.

That is the part ignored in the coverage. Israel is a country with very serious structural problems right now. The demographics are the main driver. While Israel fertility is above replacement, it is largely due to the ultra-orthodox (Haredi). Their fertility rate is a whopping 6.48 children per woman. Meanwhile, the Westernized, cosmopolitan population has a below replacement TFR. This demographic revolution is stressing Israeli politics at every level.

There is also the issue of Israeli identity, which was born out of the conflict with the British and then flowered in the endless conflicts with the Arabs. To be an Israeli means to be the David in a perpetual fight against a Goliath. The trouble is the supply of Goliaths is down to one, Iran. In many respects, the Israeli war against Iran is as much about the Israeli need for an enemy as anything else. Israel needs the fear of Persia to keep its population from turning on each other.

We see something similar with the United States. Generations of reckless disregard by the parasitic ruling elite have left America drained of its asabiyyah. The political class senses this, even if they lack the intellect to understand it, so they are always looking for an enemy to unite against. Notice the lack of dissenting voices in Washington as Trump stumbled through the crisis. They were just happy to once again have a common enemy to justify their existence.

As an aside, this may explain some of the Israel worship. The actors hired to fill out the roles in our political theater no longer wave the flag or speak in traditionally patriotic terms, because none of them believe in the ideals of America. Many of them hate those ideals as being white. That leaves a great void. For many, filling that with a bizarre worship of Israel and Jewish people is the answer. Hollow men will fill their souls with anything to avoid hearing the sound of their hollowness.

Putting that aside, this crisis and the proxy war with Russia all have the feel of a bad remake of a classic film because the United States is no longer a nation of people who optimistically look to the future. It is a land of old people and foreigners who fear what may lie ahead. As with Israel, the old gods now haunt the people. Christianity in America is in a shambles and the American ideology that grew out of American Protestantism has curdled into a collection of resentments.

The United States is now a land of priests, with no natural authority to proselytize to the rest of the world. The instinct to lecture remains, but the purpose and authority are gone, so we get men with no moral authority telling the rest of the world how they should and should not act. Notice how much they love saying, “Iran should never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.” It makes them feel like it is a Sunday long ago and they are in the pulpit of a packed church.

Then we have Iran, which for half a century has been the symbol of radical Islam for most of the West. The Iran of today was born at the very beginning of the Islamic spiritual awakening that has defined the region ever since. Even though Iran is a Shia society, Shia Islam is a minority sect within Islam, it has been viewed as the center of political Islam, largely due to its size. Iran also has a unique identity within the Arab world, considering itself Persian rather than Arab.

Iran has always been the most sophisticated society within the Arab world, due to its history and its religion. Shia Islam is like high church Protestantism while Sunni Islam is like low church Protestantism. Within Shia Islam, you do not get to call yourself an Imam just because you read the Koran. It takes years of study and mentorship before you join the clerical class. Like low church Protestantism, any Sunni can set up shop as a holy man and start developing a following.

Like Israel and the United States, the old gods are starting to fade within Iran, as the population settled into modernity. The revolutionary fervor is long gone, as most of that generation are now dead. The religious fervor has now settled into a cultural and political framework that defines an increasingly modern population. Like all modern people, Iran has seen a collapse in fertility. At the start of the revolution, it had a TFR of 6.38 and now the TFR stands at 1.68.

Like Israel and the United States, Iran is now suffering from an identity crisis as it faces the challenges brought on by modernity. The religious structures remain in place, which are supposed to give meaning and purpose to life, but the population is struggling to remember the authority upon which those structures are built. In the cities, people care more about convenience than Islam. The same cancer eating away at the West is eating away at Iranian society.

This is why the great war between the three major religions looked like a ridiculous pantomime of past conflicts. The audience was expected to sing along with the familiar tunes but was too old or too disinterested to get into it. The actors themselves are too exhausted to put on more than a token effort. The three great civilizations as represented by the three great religions are exhausted. Both sense the future excludes them, but that is too terrifying to consider.

Then What?

Posted on June 23, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film The Grapes of Wrath, a post about the neocon forever wars, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly gardening videos. Subscribe here or here.

One of the critical questions in any strategy is “Then what?” This question must be asked with every proposed move and counter move. The question is both a reminder and an assumption that the other players will react to your move. Good strategy focuses on the range of possibilities to each move and is prepared for them. Bad strategy just assumes the move will work and good things will flow from it. This is often referred to as the lack of second-order thinking.

For the last five years this has been at the center of American politics. The regime has clearly lost the ability to ask, much less answer the question, “Then what?” The war in Ukraine is in its fourth year because no one in the West could bother to ask the question, much less answer it. President Trump now has himself in a terrible jam because no one on his team thought to ask this question when they were plotting the Pearl Harbor style sneak attack on Iran.

It does not appear that any of them asked the question when planning the operation against the Iranian bunker facilities. By the looks of it, they settled on this attack because they assumed it would satisfy the Israelis, satisfy the crazies in Washington screaming for blood and provide an off-ramp in the conflict. Signaling to Iran that it was a one-time thing was supposed to induce them back to the bargaining table or at least encourage them to seek a cease fire in the war.

The assumed answer to the magic question was all the good things the administration needs to happen in order to wriggle free from this trap. Perhaps sensing that it was not the magic bullet, they immediately started to beg China to pressure Iran into not closing the Strait of Hormuz. Presumably they asked the Russians to do the same thing, as the Iranian foreign minister is in Moscow this week. Closing the strait would bring the whole thing crashing down on Trump’s head.

While the Iranians are prepared to close the strait, they have not done so, but they continue to send missiles at Israel and Israel is firing back. It is clear that the Iranians are not going to come back to the bargaining table, and they have no intention of ending the war with Israel. Of course, Israel is now demanding more strikes because it was never about Iranian nukes for them. It was always about inducing the United States into a ground war to topple the Iranian government.

President Trump is justifiably getting savaged by his voters, but in fairness to him he now lives in a town that operates like Jonestown. Everyone worships Israel or at least pretends they worship Israel. It is beyond creepy to see everyone in Washington act like Israel is the god of the world. Some sort of mass psychosis has swept the ruling class where they are convinced that their purpose in life is to serve the needs of this flyspeck of a country halfway around the world.

That just makes the crisis worse for the Trump administration. Even if they can have a moment of clarity and see the danger, they are limited in their options. If they do no more than provide support for Israel, they remain entangled in a war of attrition, while the crazies scream for blood, holding the domestic agenda hostage. They cannot make a deal with Iran, as the Israel lobby will never permit it. The only way out is to end the Israel lobby and that means tanks in the streets.

That is the thing about the question at the start. It not only forces the person answering it to think about the possible reactions from the other players, but it forces them to think clearly about the other players. If the Trump people had a realistic understanding of Israel and the Israel lobby, they would know they are dealing with hostile aliens who look at the United States as a Walmart during a ghetto riot. They would know how to treat them as adversaries, rather than allies or clients.

The same can be said for the approach to Ukraine. That has been pushed off to the side, but the neocons have not gone away. As things reach a critical point in the war this autumn, they will be back to extort the Trump admin. Given the duplicity of the Republican Party, the big, beautiful bill will probably still be held hostage in the Senate come the autumn, so it will be another round of extortion in order to give the neocons what they want in the war against Russia.

In a way, the crisis engulfing the Trump administration in the realm of foreign policy is a microcosm of what faces America. The MAGA movement finally got their man into the White House with the clear support of the public. There is a team in place that can execute the domestic agenda. Then what? The answer so far has been a revolt in the judiciary against the Trump agenda, the Republican Party holding his legislative agenda hostage, and the usual suspects subverting his foreign policy.

Cancer does not leave the body just because the body voted to live. The cancer must be removed and that is the answer to the question, “Then what?” That appears to be impossible within the current rules, which brings us back to the question that seems to haunt this age. The current crisis is a gordian knot that cannot be untied within the rules of the system, so then what? For now, the Trump people do not have the answer, but the answer is there, just waiting its turn.

Remembering What Comes Next

Posted on June 17, 2025 by thezman

Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be who is really in charge of the country.

Thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was caught chasing interns around the Oval Office, many assumed it was the end of him. Instead, he not only wriggled free of the scandal, and many other scandals, but he seemed to be stronger for it. The reason is Clinton was an extraordinarily clever man. He was not a smart man, in the sense that he could anticipate and avoid problems. Smart men do not have sex with interns. He was clever like a fox in that he could always find a way to slip out of a trap.

The Clintons, of course, set the tone for post-Cold War politics. They brought to Washington the style of politics that is now normal. They formalized both narrative politics, which relies on abductive reasoning to win debates. They also introduced things like media spin and media jamming where they sought to control the narratives at any given moment by overwhelming the system with their messaging. The Clintons made politics into a guerilla media war.

This sort of politics selects for clever over smart. When everything is done in the moment, there is no patience for deliberative politics. In the current Middle East crisis, for example, the information space is controlled by actors chanting rehearsed lines to the other actors in the media. The mainstream media is a Greek chorus and whoever can get the chorus chanting their chants wins. In such an environment there is no room for well thought our arguments and serious debate.

This is a world that favors the clever over the smart. In fact, it strongly selects for the clever and selects against the smart. The guy who tries to make a well-constructed argument from facts and reason does not get invited onto cable chat shows, podcasts or gain a following in social media. On the other hand, the person who is glib and quick on his feet will be in great demand. If he is also entertaining, then he can become a media star and help set the tone of political discourse.

What the Clintons did was merge entertainment and politics so that public policy is often sold to the public as political entertainment. Genuine debates, if they happen at all, are done behind the scenes. Usually, policy is crafted by the powerful interests that have come to dominate a specific domain. Foreign policy, for example, is run by the Israel lobby and the neocons. The political show of the last week around Iran, is about selling it to Trump voters, not genuinely debating the issue.

Another factor here is the explosion of media. Fifty years ago, this sort of politics was impossible as Americans were not living in a 24×7 theater. They consumed news slowly and deliberately through newspapers. Television news was limited to a half hour in the evening and maybe an hour on Sunday. The media menticide of this age was not possible as everyone lived outside the great public theater. Today, most everyone is plugged into the mass media hivemind.

This produces a childishness in the people, because the focus is always on the moment rather than what comes after the moment. Like children, they want their desires satisfied right now, not at some future date. This in turn favors the performers who can deliver that satisfaction right now. As a result, our public discourse is like a comedian rattling off jokes in rapid succession. He may pause and enjoy with the audience the jokes that land, but he quickly moves on from the ones that fail.

You see this with the crisis in the Middle East. The people who caused the crisis quickly moved to the next bit when their first scheme failed. There has been no discussion of what they did or even why they did it, beyond the emotive gibberish, which is intended to set up the next bit. The people who were wrong about the decapitation strike and wrong about the response, are now dancing around on stage promising more good vibes with their next performance.

This is the cause of the collective Gell-Mann amnesia. This is the cognitive bias where people notice the errors in the media about topics they know but trust the same media on the topics about which they know little. Collectively this results in a public fully aware that the media is fake news but still believing what is in the media. Similarly, people who are perpetually wrong, perhaps degenerately so, can continue to control the media narratives on their particular subject.

This sort of public environment rewards those who can quickly slip out of a self-created mess and focus the crowd on the next performance. The clever man, taken to the extreme, is devoid of both a conscience and second order thinking. He lives only in the moment, responding only to the crowd. Like any other actor, he exists only while he is on the stage, performing his role. It is why our politicians look and act like the kids from the high school theater club.

Even the producers of our political theater are not immune to it. They also lack second order thinking. They never ask themselves, “then what?”, after they have settled on some scheme. They just get busy training up the performers. We see this with the Middle East crisis. No one thought about what happens if the scheme fails or what happens if it succeeds. No one thought about what might happen after this caper because they are biologically incapable of second order thinking.

In the fullness of time, the Clinton era will be seen as an inflection point, but it would be unfair to treat them as a cause. Bill Clinton was more of a proof of concept for the emerging mass media politics of the internet age. People forget that Reagan was a trained actor who relied on Hollywood for his public performances. Bill Clinton was the logical extension of what started with Reagan. Bill Clinton was the new performative politics for the mass media age.

The result is we are now dominated by clever men. The genuinely intelligent who possess second order thinking are forced to work within a system that rewards the clever at the expense of the smart. The smart people must find a way to arrange the clever so that they manage to arrive at the right answer while they are searching for a clever way to win the internet or win the news cycle. The smart seek to control the fire that causes the shadows on the cave wall.

This must inevitably fail because the cultural environment favors the clever man who maximizes the moment over the man who thinks long term. The clever guy who can quickly craft a compelling, plausible argument that appeals to the immediate desires of the crowd will always win out over those who seek the right answer. The result is a politics that is more like a variety show than politics. We live from moment to moment, never remembering and never thinking about what comes next.

The Story Of Hollywood

Posted on June 12, 2025 by thezman

If you make any effort to consume popular films and television shows, you will notice that much of the content is now locked away on streaming services. You will also notice that many films go straight to a streaming service, or they have a short run in theaters then get sent to a service. Everyone in the film business now has a streaming service and they need content. Like a great, gaping maw that must be fed, the services are sucking up everything they can find.

The funny thing about this shift is that the services are turning out to be a massive money loser for the industry. On the one hand, streaming robs from the theaters, especially small local theaters, by removing cheap content they would use to attract daytime audiences in the summer. On the other hand, the public has not embraced the streaming service concept as expected. Every service, except Netflix, is a money loser at the moment and none of those are close to getting in the black.

The prime example of the streaming problem is Disney Plus, which loses money every month despite having the massive Disney catalogue. It has the most subscribers and it does generate a lot of monthly revenue, but it also generates massive amounts of expense that swallows up that cash. Much of this is due to the many flops Disney has produced recently, but the concept seems to be the problem. That and the costs make pirating films much more attractive.

The streaming story is a good example of how culture is too complicated to model with a green visor and excel spreadsheet. The bean counters just assumed streaming would follow the model of the rental market, which followed the pattern they saw in the secondary theater market. Low budget films, mediocre films and even terrible films made additional money in the secondary theater market. When take-home rentals came along, these films often got a second life in this market.

It has not worked that way with streaming. A film like the live action Snow White, which was torn apart by internet critics, was a massive flop at the theaters, but then had no life in the streaming market. In the old days, it would get rentals from people curious about it or for get-togethers with friends to have a good time laughing at a bad film. That is not the dynamic with streaming. People will watch nothing rather than sit down to watch a bad movie or something unknown to them.

What streaming failed to account for is the social aspect of films. In the old days, going to the theater for many people was like going to church. It was a thing you did every weekend, not because of the content but because of the social aspect. The theater was where men took their dates and the choice of film or how they selected the film to see was part of the courtship. Friends went to the theater, even if the films on offer were unknown or not good, because it was part of the social event.

Today, the theater is, at best, a sterile place to just see a film. In most cases, it means wading through diversity and tolerating people screaming at the screen, or shooting at it, in order to see a film that will be streaming in a few weeks. The theater is also an expensive proposition now. While this still works for big blockbuster films with good reviews, it is a deal killer for everything else. The theater is no longer a community experience, but a transactional one.

A similar dynamic held the rental market together. People in the suburbs stopped at the rental place to shop for videos. Usually, it was with friends or family, as it would be part of the social experience. Young people with little money could rent some bad films, buy a pizza, and make an evening of it. At the rental place people often talked about the films, which could result in a low-budget film becoming a hit in the rental market as word of mouth boosted its appeal.

That social aspect is gone with streaming. It is a solitary thing for many people because of the atomization of society. No one deliberately watches a bad film on their own because the best way to enjoy that content is with friends. Mystery Science Theater 3000 became a hit because everyone could relate to it. At the same time, people are less likely to try something unknown because why waste your leisure time on a film that you have never heard of, that might be terrible?

Of course, the dynamics of the American film market is why the studios now look to foreign markets for profit. This means more films high on big flashy effects and low on sensible dialogue and plot. They went all in comic book films at the same time they went all in on streaming for the same reason. The flashy stuff on screen works for non-English speakers abroad, so maybe it will work on them at home. Maybe it will also rope in the valuable white audience as well

The reason Hollywood is in trouble, and they are in serious trouble, is they detached themselves from the social aspects of their industry. No other country was able to produce a movie industry like America, because America was a unique place that needed a popular culture to hold it together. In the 20th century, film, television and sports were what everyone had in common. Hollywood was part of the national social capital that defined “American” for people.

As we see everywhere, Hollywood looked at the social capital and wondered how they could turn it into quick cash. They were not alone and maybe not the driving force behind this phenomenon. Mass migration played a role. The desire to harvest American social capital was also behind mass migration. Hollywood, however, needs a shared culture to work and now that the national social capital has been just about consumed, Hollywood is just another commodity.

Wherever the current crisis takes us, it is likely that the story of Hollywood tracks the story of the crisis. An industry that was integral to the people who made it possible is suffering the same fate as the culture it helped destroy. You cannot have a common culture containing people from every part of the globe. At best, it is a somewhat peaceful marketplace where people retreat into their private culture to get away from the cacophony of alien voices in the public square.

Hollywood was always a product of the public square. For it to be Hollywood and not just a film production center, it needed that vibrant American public square created by the people who created America. The people who made Hollywood could not have done it anywhere else. Now that the public square is collapsing and the people who made it are marginalized, Hollywood is dying. The oxpecker finally found a way to kill the host and as the host dies, it dies with it.

The Legume Revolution

Posted on June 11, 2025 by thezman

Note: Last night I was on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, and Dan Lyman. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

Tonight, the two most moderate men on the internet, myself and Paul Ramsey, will be striking the reasonable tone on the Legume Revolution. You can watch on Twitter, YouTube or Rumble.

Since Trump arrived for a second turn at the wheel, everyone has been wondering when the Blob would make its move against him. The one thing we know about these people is they never take no for an answer. Every setback is met with a new round of schemes against their enemies. The relatively muted response to this point has had many people scratching their heads. The invader riots in Los Angeles that are spreading to other cities appear to be the long-awaited response.

At this point, it is clear that the Los Angeles riot is synthetic. The internet is full of images and videos showing professionally trained rioters. For example, whenever you see college aged white girls with whistles at one of these things, you know the army of not-for-profits has their people on the ground training protestors. The whistle is a common, low-tech item for professional protestors. It is often used to alert the lawyers stationed at the protest to come to the area.

There is also the fact that the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, was on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. This is one of the main hubs of the Blob, primarily used to stage color revolutions around the world. When Bass was in Congress she was on a committee that had the job of overseeing NED, while she was also their most senior board member. Of course, the color revolution queen, Victoria Nuland, is currently a senior Blob person at NED.

It appears that the plan is to replay the Summer of Floyd, but this time with little brown guys as the fig leaf for the project. The George Floyd riots were also a manufactured crisis, organized by white activists. They caught fire and became a series of race riots, where blacks burned down their own neighborhoods, but the general operation was run out of Washington. This time they are trying get the migrants and brown activists worked up into a ghetto riot.

That is looking to be a problem for a number of reasons. One is the scenes of masked men waving Mexican flags while standing on burned out cars was obviously a repeat of the scenes of blacks standing on destroyed police cars. For some reason, the people involved think this is good politics. It is bad politics because it is bad optics. In this case, it highlights the fact that our rulers abetted an invasion. Seeing foreigners celebrate in American cities like this just hardens attitudes toward immigration.

The other problem they have, and it is clear from the videos, is that the immigrants are not willing to riot like blacks. Legal immigrants are in favor and tough measures against illegals and the illegals have no interest in making it easier to get grabbed by the police and put on a bus back home. That leaves the rioting to the twenty-something white losers the Blob relies on as foot soldiers. Now, the blacks are taking advantage of the opportunity and looting the sneaker stores.

Perhaps the biggest problem for the Blob this time is the world has wised up to the color revolution rackets. Lately, they keep failing because everyone understands that these things are not organic. The authorities focus on the support networks in the same way you would attack an army’s supply lines. That was what we saw in the Caucasian country of Georgia last year. The government thwarted the Blob by going after the foreign networks operating inside the country.

The Trump White House has learned the same lessons, which is why they went after USAID on day one. That has hampered the Blob’s ability to subvert, but the Blob has access to lots of resources besides USAID. It seems the White House anticipated this, as well, which is why they were ready for these legume riots. Note that they keep escalating whenever the Blob people make threats. The response to Los Angeles is the same escalatory dominance the Blob likes to employ.

So far, this strategy is paying off the White House. The public overwhelmingly supports a tough response to these actions. The public sees foreign men waving foreign flags in an American city, while fighting with the police. The public naturally expects the government to send in the army. The White House being ahead of the curve on this makes Trump look strong and decisive. The Blob people mewing about it look weak and dishonest, rather than self-righteous.

There is also a secondary issue here. The center of gravity on immigration has been quickly moving in the sensible direction as the public has become fed up with the invasion and more aware of the details. These riots and the Trump response has put the foot on the accelerator. Suddenly, the edgy position in normie politics is a total ban on all immigration, not just illegal immigration. Trump himself is starting to look like a squishy moderate on the immigration issue.

Of course, the thing looming over all of this is the change that occurred in the oligarch class over the last year. During the Summer of Floyd, they were happy to join in on the chaos, so they could feel like one of the folks. They were all waving the flags and chanting the chants. Things are different now and the main reason is they see in their own world the risk automation brings. The AI revolution that has captivated them has also made plain the problem of too many people.

When they think of AI, they imagined the acres of cubicles suddenly emptied out, replaced by robots in the server farm. Those coders, engineers and support people will need something to do soon. AI may turn out to be a fantasy, but it could also be a tragic turn for the oligarchs, if we suddenly have millions of unemployed smart people, wondering how they are going to pay their bills. The scenes they now see in Los Angeles could just as easily be in their neighborhood.

The Legume Revolution is just starting, so it is too soon to know how this thing will playout over the coming months. The conditions are clearly different from those leading to the Summer of Floyd. It is also clear that the Trump admin is better too. On the other hand, the Blob people are relentless. Like a drug-resistant virus, they must be completely eradicated to make sure they do not return. There is much to be done on that score, but this crisis could be a step in that direction.

Temporarily Successful Paupers

Posted on June 9, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about bugmen, a post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

A basic rule of complex systems is that within them, you get more of what is rewarded by the rules of the system and less of what is not rewarded. In the case of human systems, this manifests as status. High status people will possess many of the qualities favored by the rules, and low status people will have fewer of those things. The stars of a sport are those who are either great at some aspects of the sport or very good at a wide range of favored skills in the sport.

Culture is the word we use for the complex system of rules and properties that define the societies in which we live. Like all systems, culture rewards some things and not others and punishes some things and not others. Status in the culture is determined by the overall quantity of these things. Some qualities are disqualifying, as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein learned. He was very good at making profitable films, a highly prized quality, but he had habits that were eventually disqualifying.

This basic rule of systems can help explain why the United States finds itself in a crisis that, on the surface, seems easy to solve. The finances of the American empire are not so dire that they cannot be remedied. Some sacrifice would be needed, but with sound leadership, the fiscal house could be set right quickly. The same is true of the foreign policy challenges. The demographic and cultural issues are more complex, but the answers are known. It is a question of execution.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

This returns us to the question of why the same thing has not been done with regard to the main issues of the current crisis. The reason is systemic. The system rewards certain types of men and not others. That means our elites are high in the qualities that are rewarded and low in the qualities that are needed to solve the problem. The fact that Trump is universally hated in Washington speaks to the fact that he is high in qualities that the political system abhors.

An example of how this works is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who used to own the Dallas Mavericks and now agitates people on social media. He is a billionaire and therefore a member of the elite. The difference between Mark Cuban and the people in the stands at an NBA game wearing a team jersey is only about money. In fact, Cuban was one of those people as the owner of the team. He was not just the owner. He was the number one superfan of the team.

John Steinbeck coined the phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” to describe the attitude of the typical American. The American Dream says that through hard work and determination, you can become wealthy. There is also the sense that serendipity plays a role in getting rich. You increase your odds of getting that winning ticket to the upper classes if you work hard. In this regard, Mark Cuban is the manifestation of this concept, as he got rich through hard work and serendipity.

There is a flip side to this that is clear with Cuban. Our elites think of themselves as temporarily successful paupers. The same turn of fortune’s wheel that made them rich could easily make them poor again. This is why American elites are so desperate to imitate the ways of the lower classes. It is as if they feel they must be penitent in order to prevent the hand of fate from sending them down the economic ladder. This is why rich celebrities are so fond of playing the victim.

Of course, it is not merely dumb luck that explains success. Hard work and determination play a major role, but the main driver is the relative quality of those things rewarded by the culture. America is a materialist society that rewards those who are good at our peculiar form of economics. Mark Cuban got rich because he was able to fob off onto tech billionaires a company that turned out to be worthless, but at the time looked like a goldmine.

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by flattering the political class that his businesses were holy crusades. If they invested public money in those enterprises, they would not only bring salvation to society but also be seen as virtuous. Without hundreds of billions in public money, Musk is just an eccentric weirdo. His love for Donald Trump now looks like opportunism. It was a chance to run the same game on the MAGA movement that he ran on the left for so long.

The recent public feud between Trump and Musk is useful in understanding something else about our elites. Musk feels like Trump used him, but he should not be shocked, as to be an elite means being a tool. Success in economic endeavors is never about higher values or transcendent beliefs. It is about making the mechanics of the economic system work in your favor. At every level, the people involved are nothing more than tools to be used by those above them.

This makes the people at the top the most successful tools in the system. They are the tools the system uses to exploit the rest of the tools. It is no wonder then that the political elites use the economic elites as tools for their success. Trump’s relationship with Musk shows that Trump has learned how to be good at politics by using members of the economic elite like Musk as tools in his new trade. In a society of tools, everyone is eventually used and then discarded, even the elite tools.

This brings us back to those vexing problems of the current crisis. The solution is clear, but the execution requires men with the will to do it. Such men are never mere tools of the system, but men with a sense of nobility. They are men who understand why old men plant fruit trees. They have a higher purpose than the mere collection of things, and they do not see themselves as temporarily successful paupers. Their nobility is independent of their utility.

The American system does not produce such men because it does not reward the qualities that such men must possess. In fact, having a higher purpose is disqualifying in most areas of life. The businessman who sees his company as part of the social fabric will be ruined by those who can think only in money. The politician who speaks of sacrifice will lose to one promising free money. Materialism demands that you live in the present, so you can never transcend the present.

It was not always so for America. It is the transformation that occurred in the twentieth century that resulted in a system that produces our current elites. It is the failure of those elites that will bring about the end of the system that created them. Perhaps what comes next will once again reflect the essential American character, but this assumes there will be enough of those essential Americans to make it possible. That is the great question at the heart of the current crisis.

The Death Of Experts

Posted on June 4, 2025 by thezman

Note: Tonight at 8:00 EDT, Paul and I will be talking about what it means to be a dissident in this age. The show is on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.

A strange thing developing in pseudo-intellectual circles is the defense of expertise, by which is meant the defense of credentialism. People long on credentials, but short on practical knowledge and experience, are demanding they get the respect they deserve as experts in their respective fields. Nathan Cofnas is the latest to get in on the issue by demanding we respect his authority as an expert. Dick Hanania has also used to the issue to get attention online.

It is not a new issue nor one exclusive to the sorts of people who seek attention online as “influencers.” Credentialism produces a class of people who have no practical knowledge, so they have no experience. The lack of experience means they have no tangible results to back up their claims to expertise. This produces a class of people who defend credentialed experts. The anti-Trump crank Tom Nichols is a good example of the type. He even wrote a book defending credentialed experts.

Credentialism itself is a sign the system has entered its denouement. It signals the capture of the system by people who are motivated by class consciousness rather than a genuine expertise in a specific field. The group of people devoted to genuine expertise are shouldered aside by those devoted to defending the privileges that come from claiming expertise. To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.

This is the flaw in Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction, at least as far as it applies to the managerial state. It is not that there are too many elites for the available positions, but that the nature of elite degrades over time. The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.

That aside, for those interested in seeing how the defense of credentialism manifests with the next generations, this video is a good start. Dave Greene, the man behind the YouTube channel The Distributist, debated Nathan Cofnas, the person who gained some notoriety attacking Kevin MacDonald a half dozen years ago. Cofnas is now trying to create a new career defending credentialism. Cofnas then defended his performance with former pornographer Luke Ford.

Without knowing it, at least as a front brain process, Cofnas is engaging in a group activity in his defense of credentialism. He is appealing to the people who may or may not allow him to remain in the expert class. He is not trying to convince the rubes to respect his authority. He is signaling to his betters that he is a reliable candidate for admission into the club. His thumbless way of doing it is his undoing, but it the behavior elicited by the selection mechanisms of credentialism.

A more nuanced example is this post on Zero Hedge about the plan circulating in the West to cut themselves off from cheap energy products. The origin of the post is the site OilPrice.com, which is a clearing house of postings about the energy markets. The author of the post is someone calling himself Cyril Widdershoven. That is not a fake internet name, but a real person. Here is his CV on LinkedIn. He is an anthropomorphized example of credentialism.

If you read the postings of Cyril Widdershoven at that site, what you see is that he is usually wrong in his predictions. His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class. That is the key to his wrongness. He is always wrong in the same way everyone else in the expert class is wrong. In managerialism, being wrong along with everyone else is better than being right.

That is the thing about credentialism. It selects for people who preternaturally understand the prevailing attitudes within the group. It is why the range of opinions is so narrow in every field. Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star. This is why our expert class now sounds like a chorus rather than a debate.

You see the problem in that video of Cofnas debating Greene. Cofnas cannot distinguish between error and a lie or understand why one is better than the other because for him they are not moral issues. Both are simply means to an end, much in the way a sociopath views the truth and a lie. In the case of credentialism, error and lying only matter insofar as they move you closer to the center. The practical impact is of no importance to the people inside the expert class.

Managerialism, of which the expert class is a part, rests on the social capital of the people over whom it rules. The accumulating errors of the expert class, which contributes to the dysfunction of the managerial system, is eroding the social capital of society and thus we see the collapsing trust in experts and the state. Counterintuitively this is seen as proof within the expert class that they are not just experts, but members of the elect, chosen to rule over the non-experts.

This explains the prevailing madness in our politics. The motivations inside the system are now divorced from practical necessity. The rooms where decisions are made are full of people with resumes littered with the word “consultant” or letters indicating admission to various subgroups in the expert class. Nowhere is there anyone who knows how anything works. The only thing they know for sure is that you should respect their authority as experts.

Asabiyyah

Posted on June 2, 2025 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

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